Go beyond prompting — describe the outcome you need, and learn how Copilot Cowork plans the steps and executes multi-step work on your behalf across Microsoft 365.
Book This Session →Copilot Cowork is Microsoft's evolution of AI assistance from answering questions to actually getting work done. Rather than a single prompt and response, Cowork takes a goal you describe — "prepare me for Thursday's client meeting" or "pull together a competitive analysis for the new product launch" — builds a step-by-step plan grounded in your emails, meetings, calendar and files, and then executes it across M365 tools with your approval at each stage. It produces interconnected deliverables: briefing documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint decks, resolved calendar conflicts and drafted follow-ups — all within your organisation's security and compliance boundaries. Currently rolling out to early access customers via the Frontier programme, it represents where Copilot is heading and is an important capability for Copilot champions and adoption leads to understand now.
Cowork addresses the biggest gap in most Copilot deployments: people can't get Copilot to do anything more than one simple task at a time. This session builds the skills that agentic work depends on — writing a clear outcome brief, reviewing and approving a plan before it runs, steering a task in progress and auditing what the AI actually did. It's best suited to knowledge workers, project leads, managers, analysts and Copilot adoption champions who want to push beyond basic prompting and understand where Copilot is heading next.
A focused session designed to build real-world skills fast.
What Copilot Cowork is and how it differs from Copilot Chat — executing work rather than answering questions. We walk through the plan-to-action loop that turns a stated goal into a step-by-step plan before anything happens, and see how Work IQ signals ground that plan in your emails, meetings, calendar, chats and files.
Reviewing and approving a Cowork plan so you understand each proposed step before execution starts. We practise pausing, redirecting and cancelling a task in progress, so the agent never runs further than you intend.
Four end-to-end scenarios: calendar management that identifies conflicts, proposes rescheduling and blocks focus time; meeting preparation that generates a full packet of briefing document, supporting deck, analysis and scheduled prep time; research that gathers sources across web and work data, compiles citations and produces an executive summary and Excel workbook; and launch planning with competitive analysis in Excel, a value proposition document, pitch deck and milestone outline with owners.
How Cowork respects identity, permissions and compliance policies, and why it runs in a protected sandboxed environment. We then audit Cowork output — reviewing the actions taken and outputs produced, and course-correcting when something isn't right.
Early access and the Frontier programme — how Cowork is rolling out and what to expect. We compare Cowork, Copilot Chat and agents to choose the right mode for the task at hand, and finish by preparing your team for agentic AI with the habits and review skills that make Cowork safe and genuinely useful.